April 21-Day 7 Dunhuang

Day 7

Sunday, April 21

DUNHUANG Spend today at the fabled and wondrous Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (now called the Mogao Grottoes by the Chinese). The story of the Caves is the story of Buddhism's slow progression up from India, eastward along the Silk Road, and into China proper.

The Caves are a scintillating textbook of the history of China, Central Asia, and, intriguingly, Greece.  They were more than a thousand years old when Marco Polo wrote that "The Idolaters...have a great many abbeys and ministers full of idols of sundry fashions, to which they pay great honor and reverence, worshiping them and sacrificing to them with much ado." At the turn of the century archaeologists like Stein and the Frenchman Paul Pelliot pounced on Dunhuang (your local guide may refer to them as "cultural spies"). In 1907 Stein discovered a walled-up trove of molding documents. One of them was a copy of the Diamond Sutra, an important Buddhist scripture.  According to a monograph published in Beijing in 1961, this "Diamond Sutra, printed in the year 868...is the world's earliest printed book...[it] was stolen over fifty years ago by the Englishman Ssu-t'an-yin [Stein], which causes people to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred." (The Diamond Sutra, indeed the world's oldest printed book, is on display in the British Museum.)

One does not have to be a cultural spy to sense the importance these caves had for the craftspeople who created their thousands of statues and brilliant murals, hundreds of years of traders, travelers, and pilgrims who worshiped here, and the Chinese dynasties from the Wei (in the mid 300s) to the Qing (which ended in 1910) which built shrines here. Leave the Caves, like Stein, "with pictures full of vivid color and grave pomp, all of ages long gone by, which the day's sight-seeing had left impressed on [our] mind's eye.

This evening, drive a short way out of town to Singing Sand Mountain. The area has become quite a popular tourist destination, so you’ll take a private jeep or ride camels out toward a less-visited side of the dunes for sunset. Here you sense what Mildred Cable wrote of the stupendous ocean of sand that stretches from this desert edge: "The range is so long, and the hills so lofty, and so massed one behind the other, that it seemed incredible such a mighty rampart could be composed wholly of shifting sand."